Poetry reading - Nadine Pinede

About the poet: The daughter of Haitian immigrants and a first-generation American, Nadine Pinede was born in Paris, where her parents were scholarship students, and grew up in Canada and the United States. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and was awarded its Captain Jonathan Fay Prize for outstanding imaginative work for her creative nonfiction thesis. She was the first Rhodes Scholar of Haitian descent and earned a master’s degree in English and French literature from St. Johns College at Oxford University. Pinede also received her doctorate at Indiana University and an MFA in fiction from the Whidbey Writers Workshop/Northwest Institute of Literary Arts.

A writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and journalism, Pinede is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Hurston-Wright Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Toussaint/Radloff Foundation, Ragdale, and the Brown Foundation.

Pinede is the author of a poetry chapbook, An Invisible Geography, and her fiction was published in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat.

Photographs Inspired byPinede’s Poems

Beyond Mountains, a group exhibition by students of the fall 2013 “Performance for the Lens” class taught by Professor Corinne Diop of JMU’s School of Art, Art History, and Design will be on display inside Court Square Theater February 3 to April 15, 2014. Melissa Carter, Kaitlin Forehand, Rebekah Hall, Brittany Houhoulis, Rachel Lam, Joshua North, and Lindsay Wade will be available to discuss their work, inspired by Pinede’s Invisible Geography, after her reading on April 14.

This reading is presented by the Furious Flower Poetry Center with support from three departments at James Madison University—the College of Arts and Letters, the Department of English, and the School of Art, Design and Art History—and in concert with “A Book for the ’Burg,” a community-wide reading program organized by JMU, Eastern Mennonite University, Massanutten Regional Library, and the City of Harrisonburg. The book selection for 2014 is Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tracy Kidder. One focus of the book is Dr. Farmer’s work in Haiti, and this Furious Flower presentation is one of many events organized around the issues in the book. A Book for the ’Burg is funded in part by JMU’s Madison Collaborative: Ethical Reasoning in Action, a new program with the mission of preparing enlightened citizens who apply ethical reasoning in their personal, professional, and civic lives.